This article appeared in the Cambridge newsletter Cambridge Connection in

spring, 2013

Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips 2013


The New General Service List: A Core Vocabulary for EFL Students and
Teachers

Dr. Charles Browne, Meiji Gakuin University
Dr. Brent Culligan, Aoyama Gakuin Womens Junior College
Joseph Phillips, Aoyama Gakuin Womens Junior College

The English Language has a surprisingly large number of words. Even if we count
words like accept, accepts, accepting and acceptable as part of the same word
family, there are still more that 500 thousand words in English! Fortunately for
teachers and students, language has built in redundancy, with certain words
occurring much more frequently than others (the word the, for example, makes
up 67% of all the words in any book, magazine or newspaper). Because of this,
the average native speaker of English knows only a small percentage of these
half million words (about 22,000 words for a recent college graduate).

Although 22,000 words may sound like a daunting number, there is more good
news. Corpus linguistics, the science of analyzing large collections of texts, has
shown that knowledge of just a few thousand of the most important words can
give an astonishing degree of coverage of English used in daily life. In 1953,
Michael West published a list of about 2,000 important vocabulary words known
as the General Service List (GSL). Based on more than two decades of pre
computer corpus research and a corpus size of 2.5 million to 5 million words, the
GSL gives about 84% coverage of general English. However, as useful and helpful
as this list has been to us over the decades, it has been criticized for (1) being
based on a corpus that is both dated and small by modern standards and (2) for
not clearly defining what constitutes a word.

On the 60
th
anniversary of Wests publication of the GSL, we would like to
announce the creation of a New General Service List (NGSL) that is based on a
carefully selected 273 millionword subsection of the 1.6billionword
Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) formerly known as the Cambridge
International Corpus. Following many of the same steps of West and his
colleagues (as well as the suggestions of Professor Paul Nation, project advisor
and a leading figure in modern second language vocabulary acquisition), we have
tried to combine the strong objective scientific principles of corpus and
vocabulary list creation with useful pedagogic insights to create a list of
approximately 2,800 high frequency words. Our goals have been:

1. to update and expand the size of the corpus used (273 million words)
compared to the limited corpus behind the original GSL (about 5 million
words), with the hope of increasing the generalizability and validity of the
list
2. to create a NGSL of the most important highfrequency words for second
language learners of English which gives the highest possible coverage of
English texts with the fewest words
3. to make a NGSL that is based on a clearer definition of what constitutes a
word
This article appeared in the Cambridge newsletter Cambridge Connection in
spring, 2013

Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips 2013

4. to be a starting point for discussion among interested scholars and
teachers around the world, with the goal of updating and revising the list
based on this input (in much the same way that West did with the original
Interim version of the GSL)


The NGSL: A word list based on a large, modern corpus

Utilizing a range of computerbased corpus tools, we began developing the NGSL
with an analysis of the CEC. The CEC is a 1.6 billionword corpus of the English
language that contains both written and spoken data of British and American
English. In order to get a balanced corpus, we used different parts of the overall
corpus (Learners, Fiction, Journals, Magazines, NonFiction, Radio, Spoken,
Documents, and TV) for a total of 273 million words. Then we used some
mathematical wizardry and advice from vocabulary expert, Professor Paul
Nation, to bring it all together.

We compared the list to the original GSL to see how the list had changed. Of
course, many of the words are still the same. Words like fashion, flower, and
music dont go out of fashion especially when making a list to teach to young
people. In some ways the words that didnt make it onto the NGSL are more
interesting and tell us a little about how our world is changing. Words like flour,
roast, and grind suggest that preparing food was much more general to their
lives than it is nowadays. Farming was also more common then, which we can
see with words like barrel, donkey, nest, straw, and bucket. Words like courage
and coward reflect the original GSLs development during the war years. In our
modern times, words like tobacco and slavery are thankfully fading away. All of
these words got left behind.


The NGSL: More coverage for your money!

One of the important goals of this project was to develop a NGSL that would be
more efficient and useful to language learners and teachers by providing more
coverage with fewer words than the original GSL. For a meaningful comparison
between the GSL and NGSL to be done, the words on each list need to be counted
in the same way. A comparison of the number of word families in the GSL and
NGSL reveals that there are 1964 word families in the former and 2,368 in the
latter (using level 6 of Bauer and Nations 1993 word family taxonomy).
Coverage within the 273 million word CEC is summarized in Chart 1, showing
that the 2,368 word families in the NGSL provide 90.34% coverage while the
1964 word families in the original GSL provide only 84.24%. That the NGSL with
approximately 400 more word families provides more coverage than the original
GSL may not seem a surprising result, but when these lists are lemmatized
(sorted into headwords), the usefulness of the NGSL becomes more apparent.
The more than 800 fewer lemmas in the NGSL provide 6.1% more coverage than
is provided by Wests original GSL.


This article appeared in the Cambridge newsletter Cambridge Connection in
spring, 2013

Charles Browne, Brent Culligan and Joseph Phillips 2013

Vocabulary List Number of Word
Families
Number of
Lemmas
(headwords)
Coverage in CEC
Corpus
GSL 1964 3623 84.24%
NGSL 2368 2818 90.34%

Where to find the NGSL:

The list of 2,818 words is now available for download, comments and debate
from a new website weve dedicated to the development of this list:

www.newgeneralservicelist.org

It is our hope that this list will be of use to you and your students. Please join the
discussion on the NGSL as we begin to present on it at academic conferences
throughout the year such as KOTESOL and the World Congress on Extensive
Reading in Korea, JALTCALL, and JALT National in Japan, the Vocab@Voc
Conference in New Zealand, and the AILA Conference in Australia in mid 2014.
Later this year you will also be able to find the NGSL taught in a new series from
Cambridge University Press, In Focus.


Bibliography

West, M. (1953). A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman,
Green & Co.

Bauer, L., & Nation, I. S. P. (1993). Word Families. International Journal of
Lexicography, 6(4), 253279.

(This paper is a modified version of the article titled, The New General Service
List: Celebrating 60 years of Vocabulary Learning published by Browne, C. in the
July 2013 issue of JALTs The Language Teacher.)